The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul-deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on your tolerance for smug yankee nonsense), the beautiful locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. Enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, the Chileans accept him despite his inability to accept himself. And so it is that--over the course of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva's shot-back-to-back 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus--our jittery ectomorph trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, snarks, whines, twists, and wakes with his face in the bush. He wants maybe to be a psychedelic icon, but he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to be Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson. Cera does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, a peck of Jack loucheness, a minor case of Hopper dementia, and Fonda's penchant for self-aware narcissist feedback loop deafness, and that's a start. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, Cera's beady eyes are in front to judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's 'paranoiac-critical method' to pick at this pair of films' paisley scabs:

According to Dali, by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially, we can count Sebastián Silva part of what I've dubbed the Darionioni Nuovo, an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, 50s Hitchcock, and 30s Cocteau, in the process conjuring up a beast with Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Jung's mythically fluid manticore "tail," and a single-first-person peeping tom keyhole crystal ball eye (passed amongst its three gorgon/hydra acidheads). Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Boarding Gate, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche --a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators. Each daring auteur is devoted in their own fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores and the unsettling irrational paranoia that erupts in even the sanest mind when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges, like a strange tropical fruit that becomes--with a blink of the eye--a dead parrot. It's a feeling Europeans and globe-trotting hippies know very well, since language and culture barriers can sometimes make--especially if they're jet-lagged, alienated, or fucked-up on weird drugs which they gulped down in burst of irrational paranoia en route to the airport customs window. For these experienced travelers, freed of the unconscious signifiers that might otherwise guide them safe and unconscious through a same-language environment, once familiar signposts and objects become strange unassimilable things, pregnant with a unique menace all their own. One of the chief benefits of being asleep in the symbolic realm, a loss of fear. Upon waking into the real, death and vividly-imagined pain is felt breathing down our necks. 

Magic Magic --the better of the two films in my mind--taps into the spirit of  60s-70s 'female mind buckling under the weight of the male gaze' films: it's got the same vibe as Repulsion's rabbit rotting-on-the-plate, Antonioni's Red Desert Vitti closing closet doors in mid-tryst paranoia. The Crystal Fairy film by contrast is--for all its mystic leanings-- more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where your head's so far up your own ass that maybe you're depending far too much on the psychedelic drug trip you've been pining for. If you expect it will cure all your crippling self-conscious depressive hangups in a single flash, think again, Cera! I know from a zillion bad trips (circa 1988-98) it doesn't work like that. Not to get all Burning Mannish, but the Ancient Mescaline Gods demand full existential dissolution before they lift your egoic agonies. The farther we are from this baseline mortality awareness, the less 'alive' we feel, the more violent the breaking out of the faerie bower has to be, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that dissolution of self, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun's superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark, murky underside of the ship is longed for like a Linus blanket that's no buried at the bottom of the sea.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy (the equally obnoxious American girl he runs into), compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate, the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if you've ever been stuck tripping with (or been) the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, unshaven armpits, ratty faux-dreads, acting the PC den mother no one remembers asking for) or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, their "I'm getting off, are you getting off yet?" babble trying to turn the wordless experience of the divine into a Disney ride), you may wince from painful recognition (these types can leave deep scars of Pavlovian annoyance in your deep/soft psychedelic tissue), but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Question is, is that art or entertainment or just a pained groan of remembrance, like when you recognize your own younger self's bullshit with a groan of pain when some first-trip youngster starts knowingly babbling to you about the truth behind reality.

Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy narrative progression. I can imagine freaking out grandly, with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. (I've done the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale). I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving Mr. "Magnificent" Anderson of a red pill psychedelic seeker as much as I would hate to trip with him. Forsooth, methinks he is a wally. 

Cera handles the abuse well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Welles' Ambersons, i.e. a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a cookie filled with arsenic where they forgot the Sidney Falco sugar --so what's there to eat without the ice cream face? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes --and isn't that precisely why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds. Instead we have Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, substantially cuter, and played by the great Juno Temple. She's on a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation to Chile, where, instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and rapist hallucinations), it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. Expecting to have a restful visit with her American college exchange student buddy Sara (Emily Browning) only to find her plans hijacked by a car full of other--irritatingly spontaneous--people, including: Sara's novio Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American (speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable). Before she can even unpack, she's off on a long car ride to some remote island. It would be annoying under any circumstances, but after an exhausting ten-hour flight it's just bound to kickstart your bi-polar disorder. 

And it gets worse, a straw too far: suddenly Sara is called away for an enigmatic 'test' and so Alicia is alone with these weirdos. Cera is her designated friend, since Alicia speaks no Spanish, which is worse than not speaking at all. And it's miles to go before she can sleep. Alicia's got to deal with all this life-affirming Chilean ease-in-their-own skin nonsense and it drives her mad like all the rustic Americana did  Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.

Things go downhill faster and faster, for poor Alicia, even though the island is pretty. Eventually we go from feeling her pain to that of her strange companions, because she can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I know well the feeling of this one too. Tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people who want to party all day and all night, thus preventing you from getting the 12 hours sleep you need to recover from an overnight flight, everyone seems to taunt you with their niceness. As the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in, you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse for the weekend, after I'd graduated. The people I stayed with invariably had cats and I'm allergic and would be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations started: some girl in the kitchen might say to her cute single friend "can you pass the Pepsi?" I'd overhear it as something like "Erich has hep-C."  Which I don't, and I totally would have slept with her, too. That other bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi! Even though I, being a psychedelic veteran, KNEW I was having auditory hallucinations, I still had to restrain myself from running into the kitchen and declaring myself fit for duty. 

Such cranky, crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it instead of trying to escape from it --dive into the madness rather than run from it--the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared, see? She's hacked her way clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond Ulmer's time barrier.

For the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film because the preview makes it seem like a 'Most Dangerous Game meets Welcome to Arrow Beach meets Svengali' horror movie instead of the 'Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity' it is. Anyone can do the former, but the latter is a hard thing to pull off and Silva aces it. The photography by the amazing (Wong Kar Wai's go-to) DP Christopher Doyle makes stunning use saturated color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea), helping the film look how one might imagine the Polanski mid-60s trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac would look if shot today.

Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton (and Dali) would love Magic Magic.

Lastly, I know I've been mean to Cera as well as annoyed by him. I spent agonizing tours desperately hoping a psychedelic trip might bring me out of my self-absorbed depression. I wanted to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seemed, but not being able to get there no matter how high I got, was maddening. Only in AA did I learn that everyone feels that way, just not as painfully so they just muddle past it rather than overdoing it in a vain hope some old magic will return. Then you learn that ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy, through service, sharing your story, honestly, therapy, 12-steps and self-expression. Oh yeah, OR you can do antidepressants. 

Or art.

Drugs may not always work, writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the ketamine I'd snorted was working, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World vantage-- even with all that, it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me. Every August my roommate would jet off to Ibiza leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death (my boss, being French, closed the gallery for the whole month), and then in October---when New York City is the best place to be on Earth--whomever my roommate had crashed with there would come visit NYC and stay at our place, and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous. Feeling so real, at last.

Then they'd be gone again... The same alien disconnect denial malaise would descend. 

I guess it could have been worse. What if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

Let the Darionioni Nuovo entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)

Stendahl syndrome is a real thing and now I know because it happened to me with this experimental-narrative post-modernist hybrid fairy tale-erotic awakening giallo bit of mind-melting genius, Amer (2009). I didn't pass out but I did get a full bore panic attack mind shatter moment of pure Vulcan mind meld between image and reality. I have fallen into this film like Alice into that K-rabbit hole down through the 'David Lynch-as-a-girl twisted up with a giallo fan version of Maya Deren' Wonderland. Amer isn't just a film, it's a disintegration engine, sucking up the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen like lovers on either end of a Twizzler, swallowing towards the middle and into the blackness.

What sets Amer apart from almost all other films, and it's clear from every frame, is that it's written and directed by a male-female team, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. They come together like the reunification of the conscious mind and the unconscious. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together," they noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." That they sure as fuck can. Their names evoke their respective Italian male and French femaleness, which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis, but then again, they're Belgian... and beautiful. So that does happen.

If it helps the process, maybe have seen enough experimental cinema to check the references in advance: Antonioni-ish ur-ambiguous 'intentionally signification resistant' art, and Argento-ish European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s, so the analytical signifiers and references can cascade upon you, the way Un Chien Andalou cascaded instantly recognizable political horror upon rioting Parisian art critics in 1929, or the Basilica of Santa Croce cascaded upon poor Stendahl. Thanks to these two kids who made this wild film, Stendahl syndrome's not just for Florentine tourists, or Asia Argento, anymore. This time it's poison L. This time they came for me.

Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped and carried off ever outward into space until the floor rises up to meet you like a wall

and then forward into panic
the image of self within your mind shatters
like Ellison's glass goblin
ancient crumbling nitrate like Edison's ghost dance.
Your crystal skull's shambling pedestal falls
to the marble Florence floor
Its eye sockets, twin gondolas, stay afloat.
Your back's hard against the couch still
watching the shards of your coil's shard's scatter,
the cards shatter off the diving board
couch in a 52 pick-up of fluttering
raven-hoofed watery wings,
and you swim

deep

deep down, Diabolik-ish.
The floor sinks towards you like a mouth,
Betty Blue Boy blows candy canings,
the outcast cowboy burning constantly at stake

But what mouth?
Don't do drugs,
but let them do you if they wish-
it would do you honor.

And what is the difference between faking not having amnesia and not having it but secretly pretending to hide that you have it (as in pretending you know what's going on when you don't but not really, i.e. faking it even to yourself?) This is what we black-out drinkers are familiar with --easing our way into our lives each morning like we know all that happened the night before but we don't - it's an art, a bit of sly detective work as you suss out the night's events and all witnesses' remembrances of your actions without letting on you don't remember. With a level of remorse that would crush a sober man, we eye our girlfriend on the couch for signs of her displeasure, trying to fathom what we may have done to embarrass her... pretending we already know and are sorry, as we quietly (when she's in the bathroom),
and with practiced legerdemain,
spike our orange juice.

Many have tried and a few have come close to harnessing the kind of alternating current a romantic male-female directing-writing team couple can generate: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, which means John Carpenter in the limelight, Hill to the side. No film has made it all the way past the border of gender and to the boundary of the split subject, avoiding picking the man as the director, woman as producer, or writer, or vice versa --no film makes it past nationality, temper and even age, smashing through the wall between the bathroom doors and finding its own special hidden alcove. Amer isn't the male gaze or the female gaze but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil Laura Mars strips and arranged in Sergio Leone eye close-up layers to form something as new as neither, something genuinely transgressive without relying on anything so paltry as meaning, story, narrative, coherence or logic... or even cheap shocks. Would your dreams ever deign to use them? Why should Amer? Instead it resists even the fundamental hazard at a guess of meaning critics might find in something similarly post-structuralist like Antonioni's Red Desert or Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. It's something as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting signifiers of the real to properly adhere.

The male-female creative interaction of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani seems mirrored in the zig-zag rhythm of the shots - one step into giallo narrative, one step back along fractured dream surrealism, each refracting and reflecting the predecessor - move, countermove, and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but continually beguiles us into wanting one, uses that want for its own purposes, maybe even better than Antonioni did: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an Uzi and climax or dissolve into curios like a girl with a flower, yet if you don't run away in disgust, or boredom and if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or think you don't know what's going on, and if instead you just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus locking into place while busting open at the same time, the unconscious's language signifiers becoming reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.

When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale iconography it's important to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness. Your dreams are the same whether or not you die outside of them - death in your bed doesn't wake you from the nightmare. The razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who stopped running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin. Only through fear of change, or merging, of opening the self's border, does one hold onto the virginity of a tangible unchanging self. All else is transition. All of Amer is this transition - it is a coming attractions highlight reel of infinite length, the narrative arc of the 90 minute film split three ways, and from there three more.

The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage: Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity: Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Blow-Up and Chabrol, and even maybe Cocteau. The third and final turns to the dark again: Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci... but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert. The eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends even at the end. The movie becomes a male-female duel in exquisite corpse fashion, each image reinterpreting the one that came before, ever circling dark truths but resisting meaning and remaining the pinnacle of cinematic 'dream logic.'

The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name that can link them with certain of their peers, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles, a group who refuse to label Antonioni and Godard as art and Fulci and Franco as trash, but to see each as half and half. This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and South America and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free, there is thrives. Maybe it's their less repressive attitude towards sex that frees them from infantile obsession, helping them to make deeper movies: Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, Magic Magic, Boarding Gate, Beyond the Black Rainbow, A Field in England... but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then what are you, un poulet? dive in to the grinder! If it don't make sense, congrats. Take some acid and try it now. If it makes sense at last then bro, you missed it.

Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze (a middle-aged man filmed it), and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous (if anyone should pass as a school girl, it should be us). And when a woman makes a coming-of-age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or she projects said voice clear out of the room with the flat-age swack of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Instead of either, Amer rolls elegantly along the sharpened edge of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end. When it emerges it is, como si dice?, ready for the Lynchian eraser factory.

Counter, Paul!

And what then? The lights come in corners of this massive mausoleum of industrial space that have been dark for years. You forgot those lights were even there; you forgot the corners were even there; you forgot the machines were even there. The machines that now start whirring but you forgot what they do or what you're supposed to do to them to make them run. But people are applauding you, Nina! You didn't even know you were onstage! You've moved from being just another American whining for his phallic climax to a European calmly engaging the bivalve sensual. Now, Nina, Now! Now you really are the Black Swan. And as some trick velvet light trap choker snaps shut behind you, the concrete Basilica floor tilts up to greet you like the concrete smack of a grounding lover. And on the count of three you are back to one / true unified / split. Two/ Snap, dragon. Truth or illusion, George, at last, and for all time, there is no difference. 3